Viewing entries tagged
@philoapplefarm

New Year New Opportunities for Studio B

January 16, 2023

Healdsburg is justly famous as a mecca of fine dining these days, and Barndiva is proud to have been a part of that evolution, just as we are truly honored to have been awarded a Michelin Star for a second year. But this community has always been about more than fine dining for us. It is also a motherlode of single owner shops and galleries, makers and creators, neighbors, and friends – all of us surrounded by magnificent, verdant countryside.

If the past few years have taught us anything about keeping this landscape truly healthy so we can all thrive, we need to gather more to talk and listen, the better to protect what we love about this singular community. And who knows, these conversations might eventually have a ripple effect.

So it is that one of our resolutions this New Year is to focus on extended use of Studio Barndiva to foster more ongoing community conversations. First up in the newly branded Studio B is an afternoon celebrating four remarkable women whose food journeys have a great deal to teach us.

Tanya Holland is a new friend of the barn, a restaurateur, magnetic TV & podcast host and cookbook author of bestsellers like “Brown Sugar Kitchen.” She has just released a fabulous new cookbook called “California Soul,” something she has in abundance and is gracious enough to share.

Jennifer Reichardt is the winemaker/owner of Raft Wines always a star at The Pink Party and Fête Blanc – and she also has a new cookbook, “The Whole Duck,” which draws its recipes from her family owned business Liberty Duck – a valued purveyor of Barndiva’s since the day we opened.

We have admired Elizabeth Falkner since her Citizen Cake days, long before she went on to open four more acclaimed restaurants in San Francisco and New York and became an international presence as a TV personality and consultant. She now adds filmmaker to her impressive resume with the release “Sorry We’re Closed,” a timely film she directed about how the pandemic has adversely affected small restaurants throughout the country.

Healdsburg’s Duskie Estes hardly needs an introduction — the former owner of beloved restaurant Zazu and The Black Pig Meat Co with husband John Stewart, she is an iron chef, a brilliant speaker and mentor to many. Duskie has transformed Healdsburg’s non-profit Farm to Pantry in ways that are having a profound impact across the state on how to address food insecurity by strengthening our faltering food distribution systems.

That these four women are successful business owners, Top Chefs, Iron Chefs, Food Network Stars, winemakers and authors isn’t beside the point – the take away for us is how they are all using their considerable personal successes to fuel conversations about definitive ways to support farms, restaurants, and organizations that care as much about people as the food they source, serve, and distribute.

In the final days of December, we hosted a sold-out dinner for the late Sally Schmitt’s Six California Kitchens with Sally’s family, friends of our Philo family for many many years. Winemaker Phil Baxter gave a toast that night I have thought about often since. It was after a cooking class with Sally in 1999 that his parents decided to uproot their lives and come live and work in the Anderson Valley. “That single experience, Phil explained, “that connection to the Schmitt family, is the pure reason why I am living in Anderson Valley and doing what I do today.”

We are all looking for pure connections, especially those that provide direction to our lives. We all know they are rare. But as we try and build our businesses around meaningful lives in these most difficult times, trying to feed necessary personal notions of success that will keep us going, it is essential we form more inclusive, expansive definitions of what it means to be part of a “family.” Cooking and serving food and wine to the public we are ever mindful of farming practices and conscious sourcing; we try to honor connections to our purveyors and our work force. But you, our customers and clients, are the other side of that equation. Taken altogether, in good faith, in an environment where kindness matters, this is the family we have chosen.

We hope you are able to join us on January 22nd in Studio B, and meet these four remarkable women. We will be sipping Alma de Oakland cocktails and Raft wine, nibbling bites Chef Erik Anderson has prepared from California Soul. The authors will be talking about and signing their cookbooks, we’ll hear about and preview a bit of “Sorry We’re Closed,” and Duskie will inspire us about the vital mission of Farm to Pantry and what they have planned for the new year. If you are unable to be with us we encourage you to go out and purchase ‘California Soul’ and ‘The Whole Duck’ cookbooks at your local bookshop, seek out Elizabeth’s Film “Sorry We’re Closed,” and to find and support – with whatever resources you can manage – a non-profit food distribution network where you live.

FOOD NEWS: Chef Erik Anderson’s Winter Prix Fixe Menu

We are thrilled to present prix fixe menus this winter the better to showcase more of Erik’s prodigious talents. The menus will also enable us– including our chefs – to spend more time with our guests. The prix fixe will reflect exciting seasonal changes every week*, and can be enjoyed by vegetarians from start to sweet finish. Wine pairings are optional – a chance to dig through the cellar for gems and wines we love from lesser known vineyards. This week’s pairing from Barndiva’s (and soon to open Maison Healdsburg Wine Bar) Jade Hufford.

Starting this Janurary there will also be Bar Menus ~ come in for a Scott Beattie cocktail and share something unexpected.

We’d love to see you.

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Becoming PaVlov and the Dogs

October 19, 2020

I was half listening to a podcast - my go to these days is Ezra Klein but more likely given the subject it might have been the wonderful On Being with Krista Tippett - when the term Dominant Trigger Responses jumped out at me. We all know what they are in general, those seemingly automatic responses beyond our control that cause us to react in a certain way; we even know which constants in life are going to provoke them fastest: parents, kids, politicians. But what about the inverse? Pavlov’s groundbreaking research in the late 19th century on conditional responses took neutral stimulus and consistently exposed his test subject dogs to situational triggers to create new and long lasting connections. He used a bell which has no negative or positive connotations, but most of our dominant trigger responses most certainly come with highly subjective baggage.

While we are all so focused on uncontrollable incoming dangers (pandemic, tattered economy, smoke-filled skies) and the fraught emotions they trigger, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we actually have the power to condition our responses to stimuli of our choosing as well. Enduring love, work you feel better for doing, and of course the natural world are all good contenders for sustained attention that over time can trigger positive responses in us. No one’s saying it’s easy. But wouldn’t it be nice to balance fear-driven emotions with ones that move us to beauty, contentment, joy?

The hard work ahead to rebuild this economy and deal with climate changes that affect our livelihoods and the livability of our lives won’t be sustainable if only led from despair, though that’s a pretty fair response these days no matter where you attribute cause or blame. Desire for change must arise from hope but we also need roadmaps for better alternatives. We must play a role in creating many of these for ourselves.

Increasingly I take time every day to tune out the noise and focus on small things that come wrapped in scent, flavor, color. A walk through the orchards and out into the forest does it for me. Any garden that’s been tended with care. Sometimes I stand quietly in the corner of the kitchen and watch the repetitive actions of folding dough, cutting vegetables, stirring stock pots, all the food prep and cooking that perfumes the air with fragrant possibility. Then I wander outside to fully take in one of Dan’s floral arrangements that he’s hidden in plain sight in the gardens, where unless there is something seriously amiss in your world, delight is the natural default reaction.

A precious few weeks every fall all my happy trigger responses light up on an old packing shed hanging over the Navarro river. The Anderson Valley is a first love for me, and an enduring one after 35 years dry farming on Greenwood Ridge. Though it’s been hard work for our family, it has curiously always given back more than it takes, which I guess is why we’re still here. This year, with nature feeling so fragile, the general health of the republic so vulnerable, it was a blessing to be able to stand under the trees shedding golden leaves and watch our apples be transformed into juice, syrup and cider. The Philo Apple Farm - the Bates and Schmitt families arrived the same year we did to the Valley - still opens its beautiful antique press one day a week to anyone in the community growing organic apples. It’s a tradition that engenders goodwill on so many levels that just waiting around to start the press up (and that can take a while) fires up the amygdala. The small talk between old friends, the first snap of a beer being opened, the grind of the press sputtering to life, the creak of the apples bumping up the conveyor belt, cars thumping over the high spots on the bridge, the air alive with the glorious smell of apple juice reducing down to syrup in the outdoor cooker, these are all small random things that imprinted over time compress in memory like a glittering diamond.

We often think we have to go in search of meaningful sensation when it’s all around us just waiting to be found. The first step is sharpening our five senses to the gifts a single moment might hold. Smell is the sense closest to memory and thus the easiest to access - it’s the smell of coffee that triggers the brain before caffeine ever hits the system. Ambient sound also works on us subliminally - think of the way cocktail shakers in a busy restaurant trigger anticipation even if you are not drinking. Color is another huge trigger. Rothko believed fields of color were spiritual planes that could tap into our most basic human emotions, but you don’t need to be a great painter to access them all the time. As the vineyards begin to glow, glorious gold and russet colors will be all around us for the next few weeks. It was already all around us at The Apple Farm - starting in the bins of ripening apples.

I am no Pollyanna, quite the contrary. The sight and smell of a bunch of apples isn’t going to solve the world’s problems. But the singular beauty of nature’s seasons present innumerable moments that over time can hold the power to become dominant trigger responses of the positive kind that help provide the balance we need to face those problems. Right now, fall is resplendent. Wrap yourself in it. Then let’s get back to work.

The Philo Apple Farm

Hospitality of an authentic, beautiful and utterly delicious frame of mind is what it’s all about @philoapplefarm. They know what they do well (practically everything) and are easy about making all the working parts of their farm open and welcoming. If you haven’t yet come for a stay, they are safely booking reservations. Cruz may or may not bake for you but you will leave full to the brim, I promise you. If you’re just passing through the Valley, the Farmstand, with all The Apple Farm’s wonderful jams, chutneys, ciders, juice and in season produce, is open 9-6.

Rita and Jerzy are the third generation living and working the Apple Farm, along with Rita’s parents, Karen and Tim. Their help at crush is invaluable- though it a delight to see them anywhere, anytime.

We had two teams crushing with Lukka and Dan this year … first up was chefs Jordan and Neidy and our longtime manager Cathryn. At the next crush our spectacular three bar divas- Isabel, Terra and Hayden - took over. And at both crushes and at the farm with us all year we have been so happy to work with new farmer and budding (pun intended) florist Nick.

Least I forget a great positive trigger for me these days: Our farm managers Dan’s instagram @daniel.james.co. Enjoy daily.

#saverestaurants #staytuned #stayhealthy #stayhealdsburg #healdsburgchamber #eattheview #barndiva #togo #healdsburg #thisishealdsburg #sonomacounty #mendocinocounty #sommtablehealdsburg #sonomastrong #ediblemarinwc #lovehealdsburg #biteclubeats @barndivahealdsburg @chef.jordan.rosas @spontaneidy

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#food2firefighters

August 25, 2020

Hard to know what to think. One minute we’re mastering all the complicated bits involved in re-opening for service during a pandemic when all of a sudden 11,000 lightning bolts start raining down from what was just a hot, exceedingly innocent looking clear blue sky day. Even if you don’t let your mind go in the wrath direction, it sure does feel like the state of California got up on the wrong side of the bed a few years in a row.

Before we knew it multiple fires, one just a ridge over to the west of Healdsburg, were raging out of control. There was another out towards the coast and a fast moving blaze in Napa County. It was immediately obvious none could be contained as only scant resources were available anywhere. We became part of the LNU complex, code name Walbridge. All we could expect was that local firefighters could try and hold the line until more help arrived. Much of the terrain in northwest Sonoma County is steep and hilly; firefighters had to first find the line before they could attempt to battle it into submission.

While under threat of evacuation we temporarily closed the Barn to guests Saturday. On Sunday we began cooking for firefighters. Living where we do we never forget the professionalism and courage of these men and women, but it still feels overwhelming to confront our helplessness. We have no way of thanking them personally for protecting our way of life except to do what we know best - to feed them from the foodshed they are defending.

By daybreak Tuesday, Aug. 25, the skies across most of the Bay Area that were unbearably smokey the day before had begun to clear. While the Lightning Complex fires has burned over a million acres in our beloved state, the Meyers fire raging along the coast and the Hennessy fire in Napa County are now contained. In our part of Sonoma resources and more firefighters have arrived from Culver City, Folsom, Beverly Hills, Rancho Santa Fe and as far as Washington State to making the difference. More projected lightning storms have ignited only 13 fires that were easily identified and contained. Our hearts are hurting for all those who suffered loss - and we were heartbroken to hear that the ancient forest in California’s oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods in Santa Cruz, may be irreparably damaged. While fire burns at the edge of Armstrong Woods, it is not in any real danger at the moment.

While the health of our businesses has been on all our minds in Healdsburg for months now, without a second thought other people’s health, and their losses, once again became paramount. We were not surprised when so many restaurants and markets in town jumped in to help feed first responders. Catastrophes are partisan free zones. It never ceases to amaze what can be accomplished when people from all walks of life work together towards a common goal. We want to thank everyone for reaching out to see if we were safe - messages came from across the globe - and one stood out for asking what many of you who do not live here may be thinking. A friend from far away, no doubt overwhelmed with concern shrieked, “How can you continue to live there?”

Here’s the thing: with Covid-19 ongoing, the economy teetering, the climate in stress, systemic social injustices tearing us apart, I can think of no where else our family would rather be than in this beautiful place surrounded by amazing, talented individuals engaged in life affirming work. Harvest goes on despite the challenges we may face. There is a wonderful, inexorable optimism in farming food and growing grapes when you love a landscape, understand its history, want to protect its structural health. We draw from that every day. Then we cook as if our lives depended on it. Because, in fact, they do.

We will be cooking for firefighters again today, but plan to be open for service on Thursday August 27.

The Barndiva Family wishes to thank our dear friend Alexis Iaconis and her remarkable children Hadley and Lincoln, Barndiva’s Cathryn and the great Bloody Bob, our new wine director Evan Hufford and his talented wife Jade, and the amazing Felix. Thank you as well for wonderful contributions from Single Thread Farms and the Philo Apple Farm of gorgeous produce. Lukka’s ability to connect with the GoFundMe campaign #food2firefighters was enabled by the infectious energy of Skip and The Healdsburg Running Company. Great neighbors. They get it. Give what you can.